General MacArthur was extremely critical of the military advice
that President Kennedy was getting from the Pentagon,
blaming it on the military leadership of the previous ten years
which, he said, had advanced the wrong officers.

MACARTHUR, JFK, KOREA & VIETNAM

"You were lucky to have that mistake happen in a place like Cuba,
where the strategic cost was not too great,"
he said about the Bay of Pigs,
and urged the President not to listen too carefully
to advisers who favored a military buildup in Vietnam.

To Orwell Today,
re: POWs FORGOTTEN IN KOREA

The Korean war is only "forgotten" by those who were untouched by it. If one lost a father or brother or close friend...It is unlikely that they will forget the war.

I blame Truman for an entire series of idiotic strategy decisions... by not arming Syman Rhee to defend his country against the North when intelligence clearly knew a build-up of Communist agressive arms had taken place........by not stopping our forces midway past the 38th parallell...past Pyongyang.....when the North was clearly beaten and Red China was clearly indicating....and openly saying ......they would enter if we continued .... and if one looks closely enough...(few have) they can see that MacArthur was not as insubordinate as Truman made him appear.

The Truman adminstration JCS gave MacArthur permission to defend at the Han river...after...after...the Han had already been crossed. ??...and permission to move a regimental combat team to Wosan...also...after Wosan...had been taken.

Also...it is not historically mistaken...it is a blatant and orchestrated shameless lie...that Truman relied on MacArthur's (apparently faulty) judgement about Chinese entry into the war to make his fatal decision....of going North to the Yalu.......He undoubtedly knew...better than MacArthur ..... that China would enter the war if he did so.....

His meeting at Wake island ...and the strategy proposed to MacArthur at this meeting.....were misrepresented to the JCS upon his return.........as to make MacArthur appear even more insolent and insubordinate...... (Only Truman's team was allowed to make minutes or take notes at the meeting).

These lies have shamed and lessened the reputation of one of the finest soldiers this nation has ever had. I think we have a duty as Americans to set the record straight.

from,
Jack Pillow

PS. I wrote a poem...A Village In The North ...and I saw a Korean war veteran cry when he read it. He said "I did not know people knew these things..." You are welcome to print it or use it.....if you like....

Greetings Jack,

Thank you very much for your touching poem which I definitely want to share with the readers - A VILLAGE IN THE NORTH.

Ever since seeing the movie MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE I have been horrified at the thought of American soldiers being kidnapped and kept as prisoners by the Chinese and Russians in North Korea.

It amazed me last summer when a real-life Manchurian Candidate was released by North Korea but he was too afraid of his own government - the United States - to leave because Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (Orwellian for Minister of War) was accusing him of being a deserter instead of a POW. See UNCLE SAM SAYS POW DESERTED.

In today's news I notice that Rumsfeld is in China making speeches to the Communist Party and is being allowed to tour some of their military facilities which the American people unknowingly have been building up. See ARMING OUR ENEMIES.

China's secretive military. CSN, Oct 18, 2005
Secretary Rumsfeld arrives Tuesday on his first official visit to Beijing....Military exchanges between the US and China have been robust....Chinese PLA officers have ridden US fighter jets, boarded nuclear submarines, sat in on classes at West Point, and visited the strategic command at Cheyenne Mountain. But US military visits to China have been mostly a matter of seeing parades or an empty base....

Recent articles in The London Times expose how the USA government - during and after World War II - helped Communism come to power under Mao Tse-tung, instead of helping the democratic Chiang Kai-shek as they were pretending to do. China as a nation would have been free, but instead has been in the possession of tyrants ever since. But Taiwan, under Kai-shek, has been free.

Stalin's ghost haunts China (USA future secretary of state allowed Red Army to escape). The Times, Sep 11, 2005

Xiong Xianghui man behind Mao (helped behind scenes before and after Mao's triumph in 1949). The Times, Sep 28, 2005. See MAO'S MAN SPIED ON KAI-SHEK

Also in the news today is an article which says that the lies about the Korean War need to be exposed:

The Real History of the Korean War. Seoul Times, Oct 18, 2005
...Gen. Douglas MacArthur deserves credit for the heroic counter-offensive that he organized. The landing of allied forces at Inchon in September 1950 saved South Korea from communist domination and it provided the resources for the society to defend itself against the invaders from the North....High-level government records from Russia and China, released in the 1990s, reveal three indisputable facts about the Korean War. First, the leaders of North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China coordinated their plans in 1950 to launch a surprise attack on South Korea. They aimed to spread communist influence, dominated by Moscow, throughout Northeast Asia. Kim Il-Sung, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong did not conceptualize the invasion of 25 June 1950 as a civil war for Korean liberation. In their discussions and planning meetings they spoke of communist expansion, regardless of what the Korean people desired. The communist powers fought a clear war of aggression. Second, Kim, Stalin, and Mao did not expect a strong American response. Following the U.S. military withdrawal from the peninsula and Secretary of State Dean Acheson's exclusion of South Korea from the American "defensive perimeter" in January 1950, the communist powers perceived weakness in their enemies. They saw an opportunity to seize territory at little cost. They were not deterred from attacking South Korea, as they were elsewhere. Washington failed to show enough force before 25 June 1950 to deter aggression. U.S. military weakness encouraged communist belligerence. As the first weeks of the war indicated, U.S. weakness also made a repulsion of communist advances almost impossible. The American military presence near the Korean peninsula was, in fact, very light and it was much too slow to react. Gen. Douglas MacArthur remains a controversial figure in South Korea and the United States, but he deserves credit for the heroic counter-offensive that he organized. The landing of allied forces at Inchon in September 1950 saved South Korea from communist domination and it provided the resources for the society to defend itself against the invaders from the North...[end quoting from Seoul Times]

I wasn't very knowledgeable about the meeting you mention on Wake Island where the Joint Chiefs of Staff misrepresented MacArthur's strategy for fighting the Korean War so I did a little research at PRESIDENT TRUMAN & GENERAL MACARTHUR. Even though this is written from the perspective of Truman's team there is much reading-between-the lines indicating that the whole thing was a set-up to misrepresent MacArthur and ultimately get rid of him and perpetuate the Korean War.

In MacArthur's speech to Congress after Truman fired him as Commander of the Korean War he warned about the danger of Global Communism brought on by an empowered China. He stressed how important it was for the USA to keep control of the Pacific islands it had won during WWII because these, with Hawaii, formed a protective shield for America, and the ocean provided the distance. He said it was vital that Formosa (now Taiwan) never fall into Communist China's hands and he was admiring of Japan for ousting the Communists from its midst and thriving in its new democracy. See MACARTHUR'S FAREWELL ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.

Can you imagine what MacArthur would say about the Panama Canal being in the hands of Communist China - its hands around our neck. See USA GAVE CHINA PANAMA CANAL and USA APPLAUDS CHINA TAKE CARRIBEAN.

In 1961, after the BAY OF PIGS FIASCO (which was a set-up by his predecessor Eisenhower), President Kennedy visited General MacArthur who told him to look at it as a learning experience which would help prepare him for future attacks from the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's when he famously told JFK "Eisenhower's chickens are coming home to roost and you live in the chicken coop". See MacArthur on China, Laos & Cuba

In the following excerpt from the book JOHNNY, WE HARDLY KNEW YE
O'Donnell and Powers talk about JFK and MacArthur

"The President was anxious to be reelected by the biggest possible landslide vote and to start his second term with a strong mandate from the people because, as he told me privately before we went to Texas, he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American military forces from Vietnam. He had decided that our military involvement in Vietnam's civil war would only grow steadily bigger and more costly without making a dent in the larger political problem of Communist expansion in Southeast Asia.

President Kennedy first began to have doubts about our military effort in Vietnam in 1961 when both General Douglas MacArthur and General Charles de Gaulle warned him that the Asian mainland was no place to be fighting a non-nuclear land war. There was no end to Asian manpower, MacArthur told the President, and even if we poured a million American infantry soldiers into that continent, we would still find ourselves outnumbered on every side. De Gaulle said the same thing in Paris that spring, pointing out that the French had shown us the hopelessness of trying to fight in that country.

The President's first meeting with MacArthur, a courtesy call on the general at his apartment in the Waldorf Astoria shortly after the Bay of Pigs disaster, was an agreeable surprise to Kennedy. Like most Navy veterans of the Pacific war, the President had always assumed that MacArthur was a stuffy and pompous egocentric. Instead, the President told us afterward, MacArthur turned out to be one of the most interesting men he had ever met, politically shrewd, intellectually sharp and a gifted conversationalist. Later the President invited the general to the White House for lunch and they talked for more than two hours, ruining my appointments schedule for that day. I could not drag them apart. The President later gave us a rundown of MacArthur's remarks. He was extremely critical of the military advice that the President was getting from the Pentagon, blaming it on the military leadership of the previous ten years which, he said, had advanced the wrong officers. "You were lucky to have that mistake happen in a place like Cuba, where the strategic cost was not too great," he said about the Bay of Pigs, and urged the President not to listen too carefully to advisers who favored a military buildup in Vietnam.

The President would always read up on biographical material about a special visitor before meeting him. While he was sitting with his brother Bobby and Dave Powers in his office waiting for MacArthur to arrive for lunch that day, he was reading aloud a citation for a decoration given to the general in World War I. 'Dave, how would you like this to be said about you?' the President said, and quoted from the citation: 'On a field where courage was the rule, his courage was the dominant feature.' Bobby Kennedy said shyly in his quiet voice, 'I would love to have that said about me.'...." [pages 13-14]

In a speech to West Point cadets in the spring of 1962 General MacArthur extolled the virtures of "the American man-at-arms" but made the point that "the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war".

JFK shared MacArthur's sentiments on war and peace and for that reason he had no intention of sending American boys to die in Vietnam which was nothing more than another Korea. See JFK & VIETNAM.

JFK was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963 and within days of assuming power Lyndon Johnson reversed JFK's order for withdrawal from Vietnam and on August 4, 1964 the BAY OF TONKIN pretext for war was established and American boys started their dying over there by the tens of thousands. Again, as in the Korean War, the military leaders were thwarted in their efforts to gain victory because behind-the-scenes politicians and their handlers were enabling the Chinese and the Russians to supply the North Vietnamese with everything they needed.

And, just like in the Korean War, American boys were taken prisoner by the Chinese and the Russians and were abandoned by their own government. See IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF THE GOVERNMENT and DID AMERICA ABANDON POWs? and POWs FORGOTTEN IN KOREA and KOREA, VIETNAM, GULF WARS.

It isn't just people who personally lost a father, brother or friend in Korea or Vietnam who "must not forget". The soldiers of a nation belong in the hearts of all the people. Soldiers who were 20 to 30 years old when they went to Korea and Vietnam (and were captured in the 60s) could still be alive today and until ALL of them are accounted for we must face the horrific reality that some of them may still be POWs. That's why the sentiments in your poem make some of those who read it cry.

All the best,
Jackie Jura

PS - I'm presently reading ABRAHAM LINCOLN - THE PRAIRIE AND WAR YEARS, by Carl Sandburg and have come across the name Thayer which is the namesake of the award presented to MacArthur at West Point in the excerpt quoted above. Douglas MacArthur, the son of a Civil War commander, graduated from West Point at the top of his class. Imagine how horrified he would be at the Communist Chinese Army (so-called Peoples Liberation Army - PLA) being given a tour of West Point. Imagine too, what Abraham Lincoln would think of the country he (and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers) fought four years to save being handed on a platter - without a shot being fired - to yellow slavemasters.

JFK TRUTHS & UNTRUTHS and JFK & LINCOLN COINCIDENCES

NORTH KOREA'S NUCLEAR PROGRAM

North Korea rushes to finish reactor (enough weapons-grade plutonium for 10 atomic bombs annually). Washington Post, Nov 9, 2005

North Korea nuclear talks to be brief (demanding a light water power reactor as part of outside aid). Voice of America, Nov 4, 2005. Go to SOUTH KOREA'S HELL AT HAN & JAPAN NUKED BUT NOT KOREA

PoWs from Korean War still held (North Korea admits abducting). Telegraph, Oct 25, 2005

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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